icesolid substance produced by the freezing of water vapour or liquid water. At temperatures below 0° C (32° F), water vapour develops into frost at ground level and snowflakes (each of which consists of a single ice crystal) in clouds. Below the same temperature, liquid water forms a solid, as, for example, river ice, sea ice, hail, and ice produced commercially or in household refridgeratorsrefrigerators.

Ice occurs on the Earth’s continents and surface waters in a variety of forms. Most notable are the continental glaciers (ice sheets) that cover much of Antarctica and Greenland. Smaller masses of perennial ice called ice caps occupy parts of Arctic Canada and other high-latitude regions, and mountain glaciers occur in more restricted areas, such as mountain valleys and the flatlands below. Other occurrences of ice on land include the different types of ground ice associated with permafrost—that is, permanently frozen soil common to very cold regions. In the oceanic waters of the polar regions, icebergs occur when large masses of ice break off from glaciers or ice shelves and drift away. The freezing of seawater in these regions results in the formation of sheets of sea ice known as pack ice. During the winter months similar ice bodies form on lakes and rivers in many parts of the world. This article treats the structure and properties of ice in general. Ice in lakes and rivers, glaciers, icebergs, pack ice, and permafrost are treated separately in articles under their respective titles. For a detailed account of the widespread occurrences of glacial ice during the Earth’s past, see the articles geochronology and climate. See also glacial landform for the effects of glaciation.

Structure

The water molecule

Ice is the solid state of water, a normally liquid substance that freezes to the solid state at temperatures of 0° C (32° F) or lower and expands to the gaseous state at temperatures of 100° C (212° F) or higher. Water is an extraordinary substance, anomalous in nearly all its physical and chemical properties and easily the most complex of all the familiar substances that are single-chemical compounds. Consisting of two atoms of hydrogen (H) and one atom of oxygen (O), the water molecule has the chemical formula H2O. These three atoms are covalently bonded (i.e., their nuclei are linked by attraction to shared electrons) and form a specific structure, with the oxygen atom located between the two hydrogen atoms. The three atoms do not lie in a straight line, however. Instead, the hydrogen atoms are bent toward each other, forming an angle of about 105°.

The three-dimensional structure of the water molecule can be pictured as a tetrahedron with an oxygen nucleus centre and four legs of high electron probability. The two legs in which the hydrogen nuclei are present are called bonding orbitals. Opposite the bonding orbitals and directed to the opposite corners of the tetrahedron are two legs of negative electrical charge. Known as the lone-pair orbitals, these are the keys to water’s peculiar behaviour, in that they attract the hydrogen nuclei of adjacent water molecules to form what are called hydrogen bonds. These bonds are not especially strong, but, because they orient the water molecules into a specific configuration, they significantly affect the properties of water in its solid, liquid, and gaseous states.

In the liquid state, most water molecules are associated in a polymeric structure—that is, chains of molecules connected by weak hydrogen bonds. Under the influence of thermal agitation, there is a constant breaking and reforming of these bonds. In the gaseous state, whether steam or water vapour, water molecules are largely independent of one another, and, apart from collisions, interactions between them are slight. Gaseous water, then, is largely monomeric—i.e., consisting of single molecules—although there occasionally occur dimers (a union of two molecules) and even some trimers (a combination of three molecules). In the solid state, at the other extreme, water molecules interact with one another strongly enough to form an ordered crystalline structure, with each oxygen atom collecting the four nearest of its neighbours and arranging them about itself in a rigid lattice. This structure results in a more open assembly, and hence a lower density, than the closely packed assembly of molecules in the liquid phase. For this reason, water is one of the few substances that is actually less dense in solid form than in the liquid state, dropping from 1,000 to 917 kilograms per cubic metre. It is the reason why ice floats rather than sinking, so that, during the winter, it develops as a sheet on the surface of lakes and rivers rather than sinking below the surface and accumulating from the bottom.

As water is warmed from the freezing point of 0° to 4°C (from 32° to 39°F), it contracts and becomes denser. This initial increase in density takes place because at 0°C a portion of the water consists of open-structured molecular arrangements similar to those of ice crystals. As the temperature increases, these structures break down and reduce their volume to that of the more closely packed polymeric structures of the liquid state. With further warming beyond 4° C, the water begins to expand in volume, along with the usual increase in intermolecular vibrations caused by thermal energy.

The ice crystal

At standard atmospheric pressure and at temperatures near 0° C, the ice crystal commonly takes the form of sheets or planes of oxygen atoms joined in a series of open hexagonal rings. The axis parallel to the hexagonal rings is termed the c-axis and coincides with the optical axis of the crystal structure.

When viewed perpendicular to the c-axis, the planes appear slightly dimpled. The planes are stacked in a laminar structure that occasionally deforms by gliding, like a deck of cards. When this gliding deformation occurs, the bonds between the layers break, and the hydrogen atoms involved in those bonds must become attached to different oxygen atoms. In doing so, they migrate within the lattice, more rapidly at higher temperatures. Sometimes they do not reach the usual arrangement of two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds to each oxygen atom, so that some oxygen atoms have only one or as many as three hydrogen bonds. Such oxygen atoms become the sites of electrical charge. The speed of crystal deformation depends on these readjustments, which in turn are sensitive to temperature. Thus the mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties of ice are interrelated.

Properties

Mechanical properties

Like any other crystalline solid, ice subject to stress undergoes elastic deformation, returning to its original shape when the stress ceases. However, if a shear stress or force is applied to a sample of ice for a long time, the sample will first deform elastically and will then continue to deform plastically, with a permanent alteration of shape. This plastic deformation, or creep, is of great importance to the study of glacier flow. It involves two processes: intracrystalline gliding, in which the layers within an ice crystal shear parallel to each other without destroying the continuity of the crystal lattice, and recrystallization, in which crystal boundaries change in size or shape depending on the orientation of the adjacent crystals and the stresses exerted on them. The motion of dislocations—that is, of defects or disorders in the crystal lattice—controls the speed of plastic deformation. Dislocations do not move under elastic deformation.

The strength of ice, which depends on many factors, is difficult to measure. If ice is stressed for a long time, it deforms by plastic flow and has no yield point (at which permanent deformation begins) or ultimate strength. For short-term experiments with conventional testing machines, typical strength values in bars are 38 for crushing, 14 for bending, 9 for tensile, and 7 for shear.

Thermal properties

The heat of fusion (heat absorbed on melting of a solid) of water is 334 kilojoules per kilogram. The specific heat of ice at the freezing point is 2.04 kilojoules per kilogram per degree Celsius. The thermal conductivity at this temperature is 2.24 watts per metre kelvin.

Another property of importance to the study of glaciers is the lowering of the melting point due to hydrostatic pressure: 0.0074°C per bar. Thus for a glacier 300 metres (984 feet) thick, everywhere at the melting temperature, the ice at the base is 0.25°C (0.45°F) colder than at the surface.

Optical properties

Pure ice is transparent, but air bubbles render it somewhat opaque. The absorption coefficient, or rate at which incident radiation decreases with depth, is about 0.1 cm-1 for snow and only 0.001 cm-1 or less for clear ice. Ice is weakly birefringent, or doubly refracting, which means that light is transmitted at different speeds in different crystallographic directions. Thin sections of snow or ice therefore can be conveniently studied under polarized light in much the same way that rocks are studied. The ice crystal strongly absorbs light in the red wavelengths, and thus the scattered light seen emerging from glacier crevasses and unweathered ice faces appears as blue or green.

Electromagnetic properties

The albedo, or reflectivity (an albedo of 0 means that there is no reflectivity), to solar radiation ranges from 0.5 to 0.9 for snow, 0.3 to 0.65 for firn, and 0.15 to 0.35 for glacier ice. At the thermal infrared wavelengths, snow and ice are almost perfectly “black” (absorbent), and the albedo is less than 0.01. This means that snow and ice can either absorb or radiate long-wavelength radiation with high efficiency. At longer electromagnetic wavelengths (microwave and radio frequencies), dry snow and ice are relatively transparent, although the presence of even small amounts of liquid water greatly modifies this property. Radio echo sounding (radar) techniques are now used routinely to measure the thickness of dry polar glaciers, even where they are kilometres in thickness, but the slightest amount of liquid water distributed through the mass creates great difficulties with the technique.

Samuel C. Colbeck (ed.), Dynamics of Snow and Ice Masses (1980), includes chapters on valley glaciers, ice sheets, snow packs, icebergs, sea ice, and avalanches, emphasizing the basic physics. P.V. Hobbs, Ice Physics (1974), treats ; and Victor F. Petrenko and Robert W. Whitworth, Physics of Ice (1999), treat all aspects of the physics and chemistry of ice. W. Richard Peltier (ed.), Ice in the Climate System (1993), is a modern review of the past, present, and future interactions between ice and climate.